Think Immigration: How to Supercharge your Intake Interviews with an AI Tag Team

As immigration lawyers we’ve chosen to practice one of the most demanding fields of law. When tools exist to lower barriers and improve quality, we owe it to ourselves and our clients to explore them. Right now, that means finding smart ways for AI to supercharge our outputs.

Below I’m sharing an AI prompt I use, and I explain how it fits into my workflow with asylum seekers, but the concepts apply to any type of immigration law. Regardless of your area of focus, your process can be broken into steps, and there are powerful applications for AI in each of those steps. In this example, I’ll walk through how AI can make the initial client interview more potent and efficient.

In a more general sense, if you’re brand new to AI or want to improve how you already use it, you can educate yourself with AILA’s courses on AI in immigration law and articles and practice tips.

We can all benefit from personal accounts of how the most active users are squeezing more and more value out of AI. Conferences, like AILA’s upcoming Fall Tech Summit in Boston September 11-12, are great places to do this. You can also keep current via podcasts, or on a listserv like the Innovation and Technology Interest Group or Practice Management Interest Group, which you can join via the My AILA page.

Here’s what I’ve found works as a force multiplier for intake.

Double the Value of the Initial Client Interview

Following an intake interview, an attorney traditionally had to step away and review what was said during that conversation, think about what needed more fleshing out for a particular legal strategy, and schedule another client meeting to reconnect and fill in gaps or clarify things.

With a prompt like the one below, you can accomplish much of that on the first visit while your client stretches their legs or grabs a cup of coffee. As they take a breather, you feed the transcript of your interview (with an AI-generated translation if appropriate) into the system with this prompt, and it comes back with 15 questions that it suggests you clarify with the client while they're still there. This double dip dramatically improves the value of the factual interview.

Speed is particularly important for asylum cases, because you absolutely must file the I-589 on time. Even a barebones I-589 filing done well provides a solid legal foothold. It also clears the path for your client to apply for a work permit, and it gets them a spot in the ever-lengthening line for a full hearing, two more reasons for quick initial action. That said, a more efficient and more meaningful first interview will improve your work regardless of your specialization.

What’s In This Prompt

The prompt below is designed to provide an expert analysis and help you identify what’s missing. Here are five aspects to note:

Persona and Context – The identity assigned to the AI at the top of this prompt provides the framing it needs to incorporate the correct legal context for the questions in the rest of the prompt. It also instructs the AI to make judgments as an experienced litigator would, which might seem odd if you’re new to AI but has a real impact on the results.

Taking Jurisdiction and Procedural Bearings – Starting with a search for precedents and any timeline or procedural constraints is a helpful failsafe. Like a pre-flight checklist, this can help you avoid simple but significant oversights. It also helps you tailor your strategy to the court and the circuit. Here, keep in mind that you should use an immigration-specific AI product that is trained on legal facts and cases, designed to stay within those parameters only, and provides the citations for everything it cites, so you can read the cases for yourself when it comes time.

Flagging Missing Information and Evidence Needs – Analyzing the transcript quickly helps you find gaps in the personal story and make a corroboration plan. The questions in this prompt are customized for asylum seekers and focus on the client’s status as part of a particular social group facing persecution. Similar questions could be drafted for other types of evidence collection, like helping a touring musician or visiting researcher qualify in an EB-1 or EB-2 case.

Creative Strategies – Don’t just rely on your AI to summarize. It’s worth asking it to generate alternative legal theories you might not have considered. Surprising suggestions from this prompt may be worth considering.

Ranking, Categorization, and Prioritization – One trick to getting more out of AI is to ask it to evaluate its own work. This prompt asks the AI to categorize and prioritize the full list of questions that it generated. It’s grading its own work and refining its advice. You end up with a more valuable, ranked list of questions for part two of your client interview.

An AI Interview Tool Can Make You More Consistent

Engaging with sometimes painful, sensitive details is a custom process that requires emotional intelligence and can vary so much from client to client. But you also have to get enough detail and specificity to build your case.

Using an AI review in your initial interview ensures that you consider the same key factors for all clients, regardless of what twists and turns the interview takes. It also keeps your quality consistent on days when you’re at your peak performance and when you’re distracted or overwhelmed.

Now you can reengage with your client with these questions in hand while they’re still in your office. You’re much closer to helping your client right out of the gate.

Don’t Keep Your AI Use a Secret from Your Clients

A lot of attorneys are somewhat nervous that clients will recoil at the idea of using an AI to help with the work, but that has not been my experience. We should share the fact that we’re using cutting-edge tools to deliver the best possible product. The reaction to this AI review has never been a jaw-dropping “What?” Clients are much more likely to say, “Oh, great. It sounds like you’re trying really hard to make sure you’re doing a great job.”

Think of a hot, new restaurant that has a special woodburning oven with lots of great features. The waiter’s going to mention this oven and talk it up tableside to show you how innovative they are and prove that they’re using the best tools in creative ways. It’s part of what they’re offering, so they want you to know about it. We should be as comfortable bragging about our tools as the pizza place down the street is bragging about theirs.

The personal interview is just one step in the process where an AI can amplify our efforts as attorneys. Our instincts and experience are still the heart of what we’re offering, but we can bring in a tool that levels up our consistency and quality and, in this example, makes that first interaction so much more valuable.

Here’s the full text of the AI prompt I use:

Jared Jaskot, Jaskot Law and Access 61